Ordinary Life

Our life the past couple weeks has been full of nothing extraordinary, but complete with daily living. For example:

I've been trying to do my "daily picture" project again. One particular day Sophie got a little silly with her pose, and just kept going. I kept shooting.

And then her sister wanted to join in. Even though she'd already had her photo taken, she needed a round of silly shots.

Or how for history we were studying the Arabian peninsula, so we got to make a desert oasis. I tried to do a "healthy" version, because you know if I buy treats to do a craft with more will end up in the stomach than on the craft. I was pretty proud of how my asparagus and snow peas transformed into palm trees. FYI: the sand was shredded Triscuits.

And friends came over and pulled out the science kit. They had a little too much fun with this project.

We got to go get a special treat since they met their math goals. Sophie's really struggled with feeling confident in math, so I decided to offer a reward as some incentive. It worked! She's been very diligent, and even did some work independently. Chloe's also been a really big help with her -- when Sophie will allow it. Chloe doesn't need incentive to do math, so I told her she could only get the reward if Sophie earned it so that she would be motivated to work with Soph. I think that helped as well.

Chloe got to climb up on the roof. I don't know what her fascination with it is, but she knows how scared her dad is to get on the roof. She wanted to do it so bad, so he finally said he'd help her. They all climbed out the bedroom window and sat on the roof. Chloe was a little more unrestrained than we'd hoped for. She wanted to go all over the place. He let her go out two different times, and then tried a third to get on the other side of the house, but it was covered in snow. She was pretty sad after that that we wouldn't let her do it anymore. I really hope we don't have a problem on our hands!

Then I started a big project with Sophie. When we went to Gardner Village with my parents she had found a stuffed dog in a fabric shop she liked. I thought we could try to make it, but they were out of the patterns so we had them take down our information to call us when it came in. After this long I figured we weren't going to hear from them, but one magic day Sophie just knew the call was coming - and it did! So, we make a trip back to get the pattern and picked out some fabric. To move the story along, we ended up having enough fabric to make two of them, so Chloe got one as well. After lots of work, wah-la, we have a dog.